


Arise from my liar's chair

by maharetr



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Misses Clause Challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-07 20:12:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5469482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maharetr/pseuds/maharetr
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's high summer when the newcomer walks in from the horizon, looking for some sort of redemption.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Arise from my liar's chair

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Vashti (tvashti)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tvashti/gifts).



The newcomer walked in from the horizon one hot morning in January. Binky was ahead of the rest of the scouting crew enough that she spotted the figure first. She dropped to the sand, raised her spyglass to her eye, and squinted. 

The heat haze made it tricky to distinguish any details, but she could see a tattered cloak of sorts, with a hood that shielded their head from the sun and their face from interested eyes. Definitely solo and slumped into that mechanical shuffle that said they’d been walking for so long they might not know how to stop. Binky pocketed the spyglass, retrieved her mirror, and signaled the rest of the crew.

Assistance trotted up in the form of Lockie and Dingo. Not that the newcomer looked like any sort of threat, but they might need carrying, and that was easier with more hands. The three of them bumped hands in silent greeting and they loped out together, water canteens at the ready.

The newcomer was a woman, brown skinned and taller than Binky, and coherent enough to focus on them. She snatched the canteen out of Dingo's hand and gulped in a way that said she'd be throwing it back up sooner rather than later. Binky tried not to wince. The woman wiped her mouth.

“Take me to whoever’s in charge,” she rasped.

Binky blinked. That was an unusual first question. “Which bit? There’s plenty to be in charge of round here.”

Dehydrated or not, the woman could work up a withering stare. “Take me to the person who tells everyone what to do.”

Oh. Well. “We got a teller?” Binky offered.

~*~

Newcomers this well into summer were rare enough that the gardening crew was abuzz with the news, even before the doctoring crew was done having a proper look.

By the time the heat really settled in for the day and Savannah was heading home with Jasper for afternoon napping, the gossip had settled into more definite information. Dangerously dehydrated, said the doctoring team, mostly starved, blistered and burned feet. She'd live, said the doctoring team in mildly impressed tones. 

Savannah had just got back to her space when the word came up that the newcomer wanted to speak with her, was demanding being let up on the platform “... _right now_.” Savannah pushed up the window hanging, but she couldn’t make out the woman in the crowd below.

Savannah still smelled of dung and had tracked dirt across the concrete floor, but okay. There were different sorts of easings, and a demand for entrance could be well met with just as blunt reality. She settled an already mostly-asleep Jasper on their mattress and shouted to let the newcomer up.

She usually met newcomers for the first time during the evening Tellings, and she could gauge their measure by them standing up — _if_ they stood up — and what they said, how they spoke themselves. The sitters she would meet properly a day or two later, in the gardens or back at her space, where they would stand hesitantly at her door hanging, asking if they could talk.

This one marched into Savannah's place, shoving the door hanging aside, head held high, walking like a Captain, walking like her feet weren't bandaged. Savannah straightened her back and squared up, like she hadn't needed to for some time. They regarded each other for a long beat.

“Seat?" Savannah made it somewhere between an offer and a statement of terms. She sat herself, partly to show the way and partly to keep herself between the newcomer and Jasper. The people who said this one was mad as a cut snake didn’t seem half wrong. Savannah kept her hands open, and her shoulders relaxed. 

The new one looked like she wanted to glare from her sudden height advantage, but there was the pinching at the mouth that said pain, and she sat pretty quick, all up. She switched from glaring at Savannah to glaring around the room — the mattress and its bedding over in the corner; the gaping hole in the wall — currently covered to ward against the heat, but that let them lie in bed at night and see the stars; the cushions and the rugs and ...

"Tea?" Savannah offered, nodding to the hot plate against the wall.

The newcomer startled, and Savannah wasn’t sure if the newcomer knew what tea was, but then she nodded.

"We've got water from the rain tanks up on the roofs," Savannah said as she got up and ran the tap; some newcomers, the ones that had been in bad places sometimes, they didn't have a context for such wealth. “We grow tea in the gardens. We ripped up all the hard-earth, found the safe earth under it, and grew things. The settlements up north, along the coast, gave us plantings and we gave ‘em our solar knowings.” 

The woman jerked her attention away from the water and back to Savannah. “Solar knowings? Is that how you get your electricity?”

“We got power cos we got someone who was knowing solar engineering a coupla years back. Knew how to salvage lots of the old panels around.”

“Who’s _knowing_ about the solar panels?” She’d shifted back towards arrogant sneering, but there was a hunger there, too.

“All of us, a bit.” Savannah put the shallow saucepan on the hot plate, and switched it on. “Enough to clean them off, enough to make ‘em work again if they stop.” She settled back on her cushion, kept her hands relaxed and calm, and watched as the other woman shifted, trying to get comfortable while trying not to show she was hurting. Savannah took a breath, ready to start gentle questions, but the newcomer got in first.

"You run this place," the woman said, somewhere between a question and an accusation.

Savannah snorted. "Hardly, they just like my Tellings."

“People talk about you, though. They respect you. Why?”

Savannah considered that for a moment. "I listen to them," Savannah said. "I keep their stories safe."

The woman’s eyes narrowed, assessingly. "That makes you mighty powerful, if you know everything."

Savannah laughed. "I don't know everything. I don't know how to build a solar panel. I'm terrible at sewing, so the doctorings won't take me. I’ll be good at getting back to hunting, once this one —” She jerked a thumb over her shoulder where Jasper slept on. “ — can come with." She smiled. "I do pretty okay looking after littlies, and in the gardens in the mean times."

"It was _you_ who walked them out of the oasis. The _littlies_ in the _doctorings_ told me about that."

Savannah blinked. The high tone was back in the newcomer’s voice, her chin jutted up with it, but there was a bitterness there Savannah didn’t know how to see underneath.

Savannah kept her smile soft. "Wouldn't've meant much if no one had come with me, would it?"

The woman cocked her head. “But they _did_ follow you. That makes you important.”

“Nah," Savannah said. "You can't be too important here — everyone gets hit by Mr Death sooner rather than later. You gotta have people who can do your thing, so's when Mr Death comes calling..." Savannah shrugged, wryly.

The woman’s eyes narrowed again, but this time it was anger. 

"You're still a somebody." She spat the words. “You got your solar panels and your smiles and I worked my way up from standing in pig _shit_. Why are you so _special_?”

Pig shit? The memory of the smell and the tangle of knowing came all at once. In a breath, Savannah had done the hunting-thinking: Jasper was well out of reach on the other side of the room — the newcomer couldn’t get up easy with her crossed legs and bandaged feet to get at him, not without Savannah bringing her down hard. But the hot plate ... she glanced over, casual. The water was steaming, near enough to bubbling for green tea, more than well enough for dangerous. 

“Maybes I’m not special,” she said shortly. She swung herself up as she said it, busied herself with adding leaves to the teapot and emptying the saucepan into it with a carefully steady hand, all the while trying to match this woman in her peripheral vision — borrowed clothes too big for her, skinny with the starving, feet hobbled by sores — with the tall-standing bully-woman from the Finder’s stories. Savannah turned off the hot plate, took two little cups from the shelf, and carried the battered metal teapot back to the cushions.

“I’m just Savannah,” she said, gentle. “I got my littlie, and the gardens. I talk to people a lot, and I say the Tellings of an evening. That’s my telling.” She took half a breath. “What’s yours?”

“I was _somebody_ ,” the woman spat.

Savannah kept ahold of the teapot with its scaldingly hot water, in case the newcomer went for it as a weapon.

“Youse from that place,” Savannah said, as offhand as she could. “From the Bartertown place?”

The woman stiffened, her face carefully blank. ”What did they say of Bartertown?”

Here, here was where she had to be careful. Here needed a telling that was a lie so careful it was a truth and a new story all at once. Here needed careful words — she wanted to offer this tea, not burn an already bandaged woman, whoever she might have been.

“They says it was good trading, before it got blowed up into the sky.” No word of rebuilding had made it as far as the highscrapers, after, which was a telling all of its own. “Says it got run real tight, real strict,” she added. Savannah could be telling of all the things the Finder told her, of all the things she’d seen, but she held her breath instead...

The woman’s face crumpled. “I _tried_.” She tried to snarl it, too, but it came out somewhere between a shout and sob.

That was far more what Savannah expected of a solo newcomer, of a solo walker, no less; the shattering grief of the lost.

“You can try here, too, if you want. We got space for people. Not important types, just people. You come in peace, we let you stay in peace.”

The woman glared through reddened eyes.

“What’s your name?” Savannah asked.

This was a choice, and sometimes just as big a choice as walking out across the desert; taking that first step.

“Entity,” the newcomer said. A name, a choosing, and Savannah tried not to make her exhale too hard. The relief showed up in other ways, swept her hand up to her head to shift her hair, like she hadn’t had for a while now.

"You cut your hair because of the baby?" Entity asked, and mimed pulling on her own bedraggled hair. Savannah startled. She had.

"Were you a proper aunty?” Savannah asked. “Before?"

The sharp look Entity gave her was full of knowing. Savannah held it, a steady challenge and an offering, too. Entity closed her eyes.

“There was a niece,” Entity said, soft, her voice laced with pain and fondness. “And a nephew.”

Savannah smiled, and poured the tea.

“Tell me,” she said.


End file.
